← Fame through time1900-1999
The 20th century
Whose names filled the books of the 20th century - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in French books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Voltaire23 - 2
Louis XIV of France15 - 3
Molière12 - 4
Stendhal10 - 5
Victor Hugo9.4 - 6
Louis XVI of France7.0 - 7
Montesquieu6.4 - 8
Louis XV of France6.2 - 9
François Fénelon4.6 - 10
Joan of Arc4.0 - 11
Napoleon III3.6 - 12
George Sand3.4 - 13
Louis XVIII of France3.1 - 14
François Mitterrand2.3 - 15
Pierre de Marivaux2.2 - 16
Anatole France2.2 - 17
Marie Antoinette2.1 - 18
Francis de Sales2.0 - 19
André Gide1.9 - 20
Léon Blum1.9 - 21
Jacques Chirac1.8 - 22
Charles X of France1.8 - 23
Paul Valéry1.7 - 24
Auguste Comte1.7 - 25
Marcel Proust1.7
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Brigitte Bardot7 decades - 2
Marie Curie4 decades - 3
Charles de Gaulle9 decades - 4
Nicolas Sarkozy5 decades - 5
Albert Camus8 decades - 6
Alain Delon6 decades - 7
Édith Piaf6 decades - 8Jacques Chirac8 decades
- 9
Coco Chanel6 decades - 10François Mitterrand8 decades
- 11
Jean-Paul Sartre9 decades - 12
François Hollande4 decades - 13
Simone de Beauvoir8 decades - 14
Charles Aznavour8 decades - 15
Michel Foucault8 decades - 16
Gérard Depardieu5 decades - 17
Luc Besson4 decades - 18
Jean-Marie Le Pen8 decades - 19
Isabelle Adjani5 decades - 20
Andrei Tarkovskynot measured- - 21Marcel Proust12 decades
- 22
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry9 decades - 23
Catherine Deneuve6 decades - 24
Michel Platini5 decades - 25
Arsène Wenger2 decades - 26
Henri Matisse12 decades - 27
Jean-Paul Belmondo6 decades - 28
Bernard Arnault4 decades - 29
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing8 decades - 30
Jean Reno2 decades - 31
Louis de Funès7 decades - 32
Juliette Binoche4 decades - 33
Jean-Luc Godard6 decades - 34
Jeanne Calment3 decades - 35
Dominique de Villepin3 decades - 36
Maurice Ravel12 decades - 37
Jacques Cousteau5 decades - 38
Georges Pompidou8 decades - 39
Johnny Hallyday6 decades - 40
Romy Schneider7 decades - 41
Simone Weil9 decades - 42
Serge Gainsbourg6 decades - 43
Christian Dior8 decades - 44
Brigitte Macron1 decades - 45
Christine Lagarde2 decades - 46
Wassily Kandinsky4 decades - 47
Igor Stravinsky11 decades - 48
François Truffaut7 decades - 49
Marc Chagall10 decades - 50
Simone Veil6 decades - 51
Frantz Fanon7 decades - 52
Alain Prost4 decades - 53
Ivan Bunin11 decades - 54
Isabelle Huppert5 decades - 55
Jean Cocteau11 decades - 56
Irène Joliot-Curie8 decades - 57
Jean Gabin9 decades - 58
Anaïs Nin1 decades - 59
Louis-Ferdinand Céline9 decades - 60
Annie Ernaux4 decades - 61
Michel Houellebecq3 decades - 62
Nestor Makhno7 decades - 63
Lionel Jospin6 decades - 64
Erik Satie11 decades - 65
France Gall6 decades - 66
Christopher Lambert1 decades - 67
Jean-Michel Jarre4 decades - 68
Jacques Derrida6 decades - 69
Kristin Scott Thomas3 decades - 70
Simone Signoret7 decades - 71André Gide13 decades
- 72
Albert Schweitzer12 decades - 73
Aleksey Tolstoy13 decades - 74
Marguerite Duras8 decades - 75
Gilles Deleuze7 decades - 76
François Bayrou5 decades - 77
Pierre Bourdieu7 decades - 78
Jeanne Moreau8 decades - 79
Jean-Bédel Bokassa6 decades - 80
Ségolène Royal5 decades - 81
Dominique Strauss-Kahn4 decades - 82
Boris Spassky4 decades - 83
Mireille Mathieu6 decades - 84
Marcel Duchamp10 decades - 85
Milan Kundera6 decades - 86
Guillaume Apollinaire12 decades - 87
Élisabeth Borne0 decades - 88
Jacques Lacan7 decades - 89Romain Gary8 decades
- 90
Marc Bloch12 decades - 91
Roger Vadim7 decades - 92Léon Blum13 decades
- 93
André Malraux11 decades - 94
Claude Lévi-Strauss8 decades - 95
Claudette Colbert8 decades - 96
Marcel Pagnol10 decades - 97
Jean Baudrillard6 decades - 98
Django Reinhardt7 decades - 99
Pierre Laval11 decades - 100
Marguerite Yourcenar9 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.